Jackson, J., dissenting
law despite §2255(h)’s successive-petition bar also meant for §2255(h) to preclude Jones from bringing the claim that he seeks to file here.
2
The majority’s negative inference also rests on the bald assumption that Congress intentionally left statutory innocence out of its list of carveouts, because it wanted those claims to be barred if brought in a successive petition. Ante, at 12 (asserting that “Congress has chosen finality over error correction” with respect to statutory innocence claims brought in successive petitions (emphasis added)). But there is a perfectly logical alternative explanation for why statutory innocence claims do not appear as express exclusions in the text of §2255(h), an explanation that is based on another important contextual reference point: the enactment history of the statute.
Section 2255(h) was enacted in the same Public Law as §2244(b), a provision that contains analogous second-or-successive petition limitations for state prisoners. Indeed, Congress “appears to have modeled §2255(h)(2)” on those state-prisoner provisions. Chazen v. Marske, 938 F. 3d 851, 863 (CA7 2019) (Barrett, J., concurring) (citing R. Fallon, J. Manning, D. Meltzer, & D. Shapiro, Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System 1362 (7th ed. 2015) (Hart & Wechsler)). Like §2255(h), §2244(b)—the model provision—does not address statutory innocence claims in any fashion. But that is simply because there is no such thing as a statutory innocence claim in the realm of federal collateral relief for state prisoners. See Hart & Wechsler 1362; see also Estelle v. McGuire, 502 U. S. 62, 67 (1991) (“[F]ederal habeas corpus relief does not lie for errors of state law” (internal quotation marks omitted)).
Thus, as others have observed, when Congress crafted §2255(h) based on the state-prisoner model in §2244(b), it
